


Kitchen Witch

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Baking, Food, Kitchen Witchery, M/M, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 10:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8158400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: What do you mean you can't reheat French fries in the microwave?





	

1\. 

Bitty's McDonald's fries are cold. "I'll just nuke these for a li'l sec," he says, shaking his carton onto a microwaveable plate.

"Not worth it, dude," says Shitty.

"What do you mean? Look, good as new!"

Bitty's cheese never moulds. 

Bitty's soup turns the 72-hour flu that's been infecting the whole campus into a 24-hour flu.

Bitty's tea puts people in a confessional mood. Nursey definitely did not mean to say all that. He feels better, though.

2\. 

Jack plays better when there's pie for dessert. It takes him a while to notice. Or, well, a while to make the connection. Credit the connection. Whatever. It makes no sense, so he can hardly be blamed for tangling his causations and correlations. 

Fruit pie, no matter how full of fiber and vitamins and antioxidants, should not make Jack faster, sharper, _smarter_ on the ice. It must be Bitty himself, warming his bed the night before the game and sending him out flush with endorphins and confidence. Except it happens even when Bitty's on a roadie of his own and Jack is pulling leftover pie out of the freezer.

Eventually he breaks and calls Ransom. Ransom's a science guy. "Hey, man, have you ever noticed...I mean, do you ever, um...the pie. Bittle's. Uh, pie."

"Pie?" Rans echoes, unhelpfully failing to mind-read. "Oh yeah, yeah, bro, I have noticed pie! This morning! Lemon chiffon? It smelled like the queefs of angels. Oh wait wait wait damn, bro, is he holding out on you? Did you run out? Do you need an emergency delivery? 'Cause Lardo's in Cambridge, but I've always wanted to make Dex hotwire a LAX car."

"No, no, it's not that. I was just wondering. Does it make your hockey better."

Ransom giggles. "Like, 'eat your Wheaties' better? Like...huh." A pause. Then a bellow: "Hey, Holtzy, does Bitty's pie up your hockey game?"

"Brooooo," Jack hears in the background, followed by a clatter.

"Jack wants to know: Do Bitty's pies take your game from swawesome to _next level_ swawesome?"

"God yes," says Holster, on speakerphone. "You could say I find them...ins-pie-rational."

"Bro."

"We don't have power plays, we have pie-er plays."

"How would you describe your performance tonight, Adam?" asks Ransom fawningly, probably holding up his favourite purple highlighter as a microphone.

"Well, Justin, I'd say we really crust our opponents."

"Haha," says Jack. "Thanks. Good to know."

"This is an incredible question. I'm making a spreadsheet as we speak. We can start tracking the frogs. Got your back, my bro."

Honestly, given the impact of the jam sandwiches on Jack's play, he should have figured this out far sooner.

3.

Bitty ropes Jack into helping him make Portuguese sweet bread, which requires a lot of kneading. Jack, who mostly helps with the pies etc. because he likes spending time with Bitty, falls head over heels for bread-making. Kneading bread just feels good. It makes him feel competent in a really straightforward, fundamental way. Bitty explains that you have to talk to the yeast to encourage it to proof, and Jack chirps him for it, but then the first time he makes bread by himself, when Bitty's not around, he crouches down very close to the bowl and whispers, "Allô, les levures."

4.

Bitty won't buy spices in sealed jars unless there's an open sample next to them that he can smell. He's accumulated a list of independent, hole-in-the-wall shops in Revere and Boston's North End that he favours over retailers like Penzey's. He knows all the proprietors by name. He knows their children's and their pets' names. Jack wonders how much of a hassle quality control is for these little businesses, because he's read articles about spice fraud, cutting sacks with sawdust, blending oils and extracts with cheaper versions, but he supposes if there's any nose worth trusting when it comes to baking ingredients, it's Bitty's.

There's a seller near Haymarket who grinds and mixes her own spices, much as Bitty does. Jack browses a shelf of Moroccan and Middle Eastern blends, sniffs curiously at a ras el hanout designed especially for coffee. The seller and Bitty get into a discussion that Jack can tell is going to last a while, so he wanders away to look at the other stalls. Buys a set of small-batch hot sauces for Holster, some marshmallows in unlikely flavours for Lardo, smoked bluefish for himself. Meanders back around to the spice stall twenty minutes later to find Bitty shaking a collection of open sample jars straight into a drink from the shop's fancy percolator while the proprietor and several other shoppers look on.

Bitty catches his eye and winks.

"Want to stop by Dave's Fresh Pasta on our way to Shitty's?" Bitty asks when they finally leave the market.

"He likes the gorgonzola sauce," Jack remembers.

"I know," says Bitty, smiling up at him.

Bitty sings as he makes his spice blends. It's one of the only activities Jack's seen him do without music pouring from his phone. Baking, cleaning, studying, exercising all have their own meticulously curated playlists. He sits in the kitchen with his spice collection, a grinder, a tiny, antique kitchen scale with a cherry red base, and a set of dog-eared, soft-edged index cards in a hand-painted box, and quietly sings pop songs, and repetitive, nonsensical old playground rhymes and lullabies, and often just wordless humming: melodies that sound archaic to Jack, as strange as they are comforting. If there is a pattern to Bitty's singing, it is just outside Jack's grasp. 

Jack loves watching him, his deft hands and upright posture. His peaceful focus is beautiful.

5.

Suzanne and Coach make the drive from Georgia to Rhode Island. Nestled in the cooler in the back is a peck of Georgia peaches. Bitty weeps. "It's not—" he sniffles, "that I don't appreciate New England orchards! But, but...." He cradles the basket to his chest. Suzanne nods toward another box in the trunk. Jack peers over Bitty's shoulder and sees it holds no less than eight quart jars of canned peaches, cheery dish towels stuffed between them to keep them from clanking. "Oh my goodness, Mama, you must've spent all summer in the kitchen!" Coach makes a manly, conspiratorial sort of face at Jack, who mentions that his own parents bring him a gallon of Sainte-Anne des Plaines maple syrup every summer. Coach grins under his mustache and claps him on the back.

"How did they stay fresh?" Jack puzzles, setting the bounty carefully on the kitchen counter. "Didn't your folks stop in DC for three days?"

Bitty turns and blinks at him, but it's Coach who answers, coming up behind them with an armload of Moomaw's kitchenware. "Well, son, I guess those peaches got told they had someplace to be."

+1.

Jack's Great Aunt Anzéline hears he's marrying a baker. Her own children are not talented in that direction, so after she meets Eric at a holiday party she bequeaths him a World War One Princess Mary Christmas tin full of recipes. The cards are handwritten in French. And riddled with tsujimotos. Bitty shows them to Moomaw, who takes one whiff of the magic rolling off them and tells Bitty he needs to translate them himself if he's ever going to get any use out of them. And that endeavor is what brings Bitty from journeyman to master baker.

**Author's Note:**

> (1) Mountweazels, trap streets, ghost words, etc. are false entries in reference works such as dictionaries designed to catch plagiarists. When Bitty explains the baker's version to Jack (adding false ingredients or measurements to secret family recipes, so they cannot be successfully copied from the book unless you have been given the key), he exclaims, "Oh, like Tsujimoto!" Who was a fictional hockey player invented by Buffalo Sabres' GM in 1974 to fool the NHL during the Amateur Draft. It worked. Mountweazels are thereafter referred to as tsujimotos in the Zimmerbittle household.
> 
> (2) The irreplaceable staranise kicked me off with the MacDonalds fries suggestion. Those words are hers.


End file.
